


Pulvis et Umbra Sumus

by AuroraWest



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thor (Movies)
Genre: Brother Feels, Brothers, Canon Compliant, Gen, Loki (Marvel) Has Issues, Post-Thor: Ragnarok (2017), Revengers, The Statesman
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-12
Updated: 2020-07-12
Packaged: 2021-03-05 03:21:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,711
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25227478
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AuroraWest/pseuds/AuroraWest
Summary: Things had been occasionally rocky between Loki and Thor over the past month aboardThe Statesman, but they’d had more good days than bad. Loki would have preferred to keep it that way, but Thor's recent foul mood was a...challenge. As pathetic as it was, though, he seemed to have arrived back at a stage of life where making Thor happy was something to strive for. Maybe there had never been anything inherently wrong with it to begin with.
Relationships: Brunnhilde | Valkyrie & Loki (Marvel), Heimdall & Loki (Marvel), Loki & Thor (Marvel)
Comments: 33
Kudos: 195
Collections: Marvel Trumps Hate 2019





	Pulvis et Umbra Sumus

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Remedial](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Remedial/gifts).



> This is my fill for Marvel Trumps Hate 2019, written for Mercia. Thank you, and I hope you like it!
> 
> Thank you as always to my beta, [mareebird](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mareebird/pseuds/mareebird)!

“Are you planning on doing anything useful today?”

Loki blinked and lowered his book, finding himself meeting Thor’s glare. His brother was standing in the doorway that led from the living area of their quarters into the bedroom, his arms crossed over his chest and his feet planted as though he was about to wrestle a bilgesnipe. Unlikely, considering. Which meant Thor considered the conversation the two of them were about to have to be the mental equivalent of such a contest. That, perhaps, was fair. After all, Loki was many things—and ‘difficult’ was definitely one of them. It was a label he’d hated at first—who wouldn’t?—but, well, he might as well embrace these things when they weren’t likely to go away.

Arching an eyebrow from his supine position on the room’s one utilitarian sofa, Loki said, “I was planning on reading several more chapters of this book. And I thought I might go down to the mess, such as it is, and see if anyone’s in the mood for my rapier wit.”

“So, the answer is no,” Thor said. “You’re _not_ planning on doing anything.”

“Well, that depends on one’s definition of ‘anything,’ I suppose.”

This was a mistake and Loki knew it. But he didn’t appreciate Thor’s tone. If his brother wanted him to do something specific, then he could ask, instead of taking this passive aggressive stance that quite frankly, didn’t suit him. That tactic was really more up Loki’s alley and it wasn’t a great look on him, either.

But Thor’s scowl only grew deeper and he snapped, “That’s _really_ helpful.”

At this, Loki straightened up, closing the book, though even this was a victory for Thor. Could he open it again without looking churlish? “If you have something to say to me, why don’t you just say it?”

Giving Loki a look that he found deeply annoying—a sort of mix of irritation, exasperation, an older-brother patronization, and resignation—Thor said, “You _could_ find something useful to do. Do you have any idea of the week I’ve had?”

“It’s a bit difficult not to have an idea of it when you’ve been stomping around our quarters and snarling at me every two seconds,” Loki said. This was a slight exaggeration. Thor had snapped at him several times over the past few days, but once it had been because Loki had left a stack of tools in the middle of the room, which Thor had tripped over in the dark, and another time it had been because Loki had neglected to scrape his hair out of the shower drain. The latter was slightly more unfair; Loki didn’t imagine Thor would be particularly fastidious about this, either, but he had the advantage of having short hair.

The other times, though, had seemed borne solely out of Thor’s bad mood, and Loki didn’t know what he had to be so upset about.

Well, alright, that wasn’t true. He knew exactly what Thor had to be upset about. Their father’s death, the revelation of their bloodthirsty older sister, being forced to fight in gladiatorial games on Sakaar, Ragnarok. They’d tried to talk a bit about all of that, but talking had never come easily to either of them.

Anyway, Loki was upset too. He just showed his upset in different ways—withdrawing and internalizing instead of externalizing and trying to fix everything.

Though, come to think of it, he _did_ have a tendency to lash out. They shared that trait in common.

But those things were the backdrop of their lives. They had both needed to deal with it in the first days and weeks on board _The Statesman_. It had been a month now of their slow impulse journey through space, heading for Midgard at a pace that wouldn’t get them there for many more months.

To that end, Heimdall was overseeing the ship’s navigation. Yesterday, Loki had gone to the bridge, which he thought of as the Observatory, though he hadn’t shared this with anyone else because he thought they would laugh. Heimdall still had his sword, he was still in charge of getting them where they needed to go, and where Heimdall stood guard was the Observatory. It was something constant, a holdover from the past that he found he desperately needed. When Loki had slipped onto the bridge, he’d said, “Still smooth sailing, I hope.”

Platitudes. But Loki was apprehensive that Heimdall hadn’t forgiven him. Yes, it had been Odin who had first charged Heimdall with treason, but Loki hadn’t lifted the charges. Doing so would have been foolish. He could hide himself from Heimdall’s Sight, but that in itself would have been suspicious if Heimdall had ever turned his Gaze on “Odin.” Better to have Heimdall on the run and to occasionally make a token effort to capture him, though Loki had never had any real desire to. For one thing, Heimdall had always felt like almost peripheral family. Family which Loki had always been faintly nervous of, but family nonetheless. For another, he was happy that Heimdall had defied Odin. Someone had needed to do it. Someone else, that was. Loki’s defiance had never seemed to mean much.

Heimdall had looked at him, his expression stony, before the suggestion of a smile crinkled around his eyes. “So far,” he said.

Coming further inside the bridge, Loki had asked, “Would you mind if I joined you for a while?”

“I don’t,” Heimdall had replied, gesturing at the other chairs. Loki had nodded and taken a seat, staring out at the stars that lay in front of _The Statesman_ like chips of diamond across a blanket. “I wonder, though,” Heimdall had said, making Loki turn to face him, “what brings you here today, specifically.”

Loki had made a vague gesture. What had brought him there was Thor’s bad mood, but he wasn’t about to tell Heimdall that. What had also brought him there was the fact that sometimes, when he felt that Ragnarok was still happening, an ongoing smoldering fire that was still creeping around the edges of their life raft, pursuing them and intent on their destruction, he found Heimdall’s presence steadying. A comfort, not that he would ever admit it. “You know me,” he finally said. “I’ve always enjoyed space travel.”

“Ah. Yes. How could I forget?” Heimdall had said. He had definitely looked amused.

Silently, Loki had called up a star chart, which surrounded him in a three-dimensional, interactive map. Their plotted course, their ship, their ark, represented by a blue, glowing dot, out of scale with everything else, dominated the chart. “Are we still due to arrive on Midgard on schedule?” he’d asked, rotating the chart.

“Mid-July, by their calendar,” Heimdall had said.

Loki had nodded. Despite himself, he kept vague track of the passage of Earth months, due to stashing Odin in Shady Acres Care Home. It would be January or February there now. He could ask Heimdall to check the weather, he supposed, but it seemed a bit of a petty use of his Sight.

Norns. Could he put up with another six months on this ship? If Thor’s mood was as bad as it had been lately for the entire duration of their journey, they might actually kill each other. And that would be unfortunate, considering they’d finally reconciled.

“I’m glad you came, because there’s something I wanted to talk to you about,” Heimdall had said.

With a snort, Loki had asked, “Really. Me? Why not Thor?”

“Because Thor could use your help,” Heimdall had said. Loki had winced, but gestured for Heimdall to go on. Coming over to join him within the bounds of the starchart, Heimdall said, “We’ve known for some time that our supplies won’t sustain us until we arrive on Midgard.”

His expression sobering, Loki had said, “So we’ve all decided we agree on that?”

“We’ve always agreed on that,” Heimdall had said. “It was only optimism that led anyone to think otherwise.”

This was a nice way of saying, _I told you so, Loki_ , since he was the one who had insisted they not assume their supplies would run out before getting to Earth. Folding his arms over his chest, Loki had asked, “Then what are we going to do about it?”

Heimdall zoomed in on a star system and pointed to a speck of light, which grew in size until a miniature space station was floating in front of them. “We should stop here. The sector isn’t far outside our route—we won’t lose too much time. We should resupply sooner rather than later.”

There had been a host of unspoken reasons for this. They would need a lot of food; one space station might not have enough. Their people were going to get restless on this ship; it would be good for them to stretch their legs somewhere else.

And there was a darker thought that had occurred to Loki, and probably the others. Asgard was decimated. Asgard was now nothing more than several hundred refugees packed together in one ship. An easy target. There were people in the universe who would probably like to see Asgard wiped out for good. The sooner they stopped and resupplied, the less time there was for anyone like that to have heard about their predicament.

As much as Loki hated to think it, the sooner they got to Earth, the better.

So he’d stared at the little spinning space station, pressed his lips together, and nodded. “I’ll talk to Thor,” he’d said. “But I agree with you.”

Except when he’d eventually returned to the quarters he shared with Thor, his brother had been in such a foul mood that Loki hadn’t wanted to broach the topic. Or talk to him at all, quite honestly. He decided he would put it off until the morning.

But things hadn’t improved this morning. And now Thor was accusing him of being lazy and unhelpful, which Loki didn’t appreciate in the slightest. The book he was reading was on impulse drive maintenance (he’d found it the first time he’d gone to the section of the ship housing the engine; it did not, in retrospect, speak all that well of the prior engineer on _The Statesman_ ); the pile of tools Thor had tripped over the other day was there because he’d been trying to repair a broken toy that belonged to one of the children on board. Thor thought being king meant always _doing_ something, and in the month they’d been aboard _The Statesman_ , there had been far too much to do.

But Loki didn’t want to be that kind of leader. He wasn’t good at it and he didn’t like it. For every visible thing that needed to be done, there were a hundred more invisible things that were just as important. He’d liken it to an iceberg, most of it hidden underwater, but it was a bit too on-the-nose, considering his heritage. Those were the issues he preferred, the underwater ones; the ones that were behind-the-scenes but no less integral.

Like doing something with the children, for example. There weren’t that many of them (the thought made his heart twist), but they were running wild. He’d talked to a few of the parents yesterday about it, saying without thinking much about it, “Perhaps some sort of lessons can be set up.” They’d taken that to mean that _he_ would set lessons up and take charge of them. He’d had to extricate himself from the conversation with vague promises, but…he was thinking about it.

Thor wouldn’t consider that doing anything, though. Certainly not the thinking about it part. If Loki told him his idea, Thor would probably snap at him to go round up the children and read one of the sagas to them, which would keep them out of everyone’s hair until they got bored. And then he would want Loki to _do_ something else, like fix a ceiling fan or their spotty communications system. Norns help them if they ever needed to send a distress call.

“If you want me to do something,” Loki repeated, ignoring the fact that Thor’s glare was getting harder, “then _tell_ me instead of expecting me to read your mind.”

“Oh, that’s rich, coming from you, Loki,” Thor snapped.

“Yes, well, at the minute, I’m _not_ expecting you to read my mind; I’m _telling_ you that you’re being a goat’s arse,” Loki said, clenching his fists. And if he _had_ been expecting Thor to read his mind, then his brother would have known that he was thinking far more insulting names in his head.

Stomping over to Loki, Thor grabbed the book off his lap and thumped it down on a table. “This isn’t _useful_. We have things that are broken on this gods-damned ship _right now_ , and you could be fixing them.”

Loki was glaring now too, and he rose to his feet, his shoulders tensed and raised high. “Fixing them _how?_ What, exactly, do you imagine I have any idea how to repair?”

“You were always fiddling with the engine on the skiff that Father finally let you have,” Thor said, not sounding as though he thought this was anything particularly worthwhile.

“Which helps us _how?_ ” Loki asked. “The plumbing in one half of this ship is completely and utterly shot to hel, and my being able to cobble together a repair for a _skiff_ is useful in dealing with that?”

“Go use your magic to do it, then!” Thor said, his voice rising in volume.

“Oh, my _magic_ ,” Loki sneered. “Yes, it was never much use to you before, but now you want me to apply it to what, sewer blockages? Perhaps repairing that weak spot on the hull? I know, I’ll just create EVA suits wholesale out of nothing but empty alcohol bottles!”

At this, Thor blinked and asked, his voice a little quieter, “Can you do that?”

“No!” Loki snapped. “No, of course I can’t do that, which you would know if you hadn’t always—”

But he took a deep breath. The last thing he wanted to do was fight about this, one of his oldest wounds. Instead, he said, “I might as well ask you to simply work it out, since you’ve spent so much time with your friend Tony _Stark_. Isn’t he some sort of mechanical genius? Surely it’s rubbed off on you?”

“Now _you’re_ being an arse,” Thor growled.

With a hard laugh, Loki said, “Well, imagine that. I suppose there _is_ some family resemblance, after all.” His hands clenched further into fists and he said tightly, “I won’t trouble you with my useless company any longer.”

At this, Thor rolled his eyes. “You know I didn’t mean that—”

Loki ignored him, though, punching the panel on the door to open it, then closing it behind him before he strode down the hall, his brow set in a stormy furrow and his teeth gritted. The only thing to do was to walk the entire length of the ship several times to cool down. He knew exactly how long it would take him, too, because he’d paced up and down this ship enough times, and he knew that it wasn’t enough time for his anger to abate.

Or perhaps that wasn’t true. By the time he reached the ship’s aft section, where a bank of windows stretched across the bulkhead, the sharp anger needling at him didn’t feel quite so prickly. He stopped and folded his arms over his chest, leaning a shoulder against the wall and gazing out at the stars. The impulse engines were leaving a trail in their wake; some sort of cosmic dust that they were stirring up with their passage. Perhaps they were flying through the remnants of a nebula, its fires long burned out, leaving only the detritus of creation behind.

He sighed. Things had been, at times, rocky between Thor and him over the past month. But they’d had more good days than bad. Last week, Loki had told Thor a story about Sakaar; one of the many ridiculous, really-you-have-to-laugh things that had happened to him in the three weeks prior to Thor’s arrival, though he hadn’t been sure Thor would see it that way. But after a second, Thor’s face had broken into a smile, and he’d asked, “You said that?”

“I did,” Loki replied, feeling a smile tugging at his own mouth. “And then I told him I loved the décor.”

Thor had snorted in a very undignified way, Loki had been unable to stop himself from following suit, and suddenly the two of them had been crying from laughter, Thor literally doubled over until he simply gave in and collapsed on the floor and Loki howling, unable to get a breath. The story hadn’t been _that_ funny, but they hadn’t laughed together like this for years. Years and years and years. There had been an element of release in it. Maybe a bit of hysteria, also, but Thor had acknowledged that, putting a hand on his forehead and saying, “I think we might be cracking up, Loki.”

Loki had laughed again and laid down on the floor, staring at the ceiling of their quarters, one knee up and the other leg stretched out. “I don’t think there’s any denying that.”

Anyway. More good days than bad. Loki wanted it to stay that way. Though he didn’t appreciate Thor taking his bad mood out on the people around him—namely, Loki—it wasn’t as though he could claim that he’d never done so himself. With a faint, mirthless smile, Loki acknowledged that this was probably, in fact, a good indication that they were family, despite their difference in origin.

Dropping his arms, he put his hands on his hips and chewed at the inside of his cheek. Obviously, he hadn’t been _wrong_. Thor’s accusations and foul mood certainly weren’t going to make him admit that. But that didn’t necessarily mean that Thor didn’t have a point. And Loki was, quite honestly, tired of fighting with Thor. They would continue to argue because of who they both were, because Loki wasn’t sure either of them knew how to deal with their past without arguing about it. Certain conversations would be more difficult. Some of them might never happen. There were so many things that Loki couldn’t imagine ever telling Thor.

Not right now, at least. But perhaps someday. They would have long lives.

The thought of it made a sense of peace wash over Loki, which was about the last thing he was used to feeling. It was fleeting, but it had been there, and though it was tempting to grab at it, he let it go. Maybe it wouldn’t be the last time he felt it.

Fine, then. If Thor had a point, then Loki would find something more tangible to take care of, and that would make Thor happy. It felt a bit pathetic to have arrived back at a stage of life where making Thor happy was something to strive for, but maybe there had never been anything inherently wrong with it to begin with.

He narrowed his eyes in thought. The other day, the Valkyrie had mentioned that tensions were beginning to boil over in the main cargo bay where the people were staying. It wasn’t a surprise. There weren’t many of them left, but there were certainly enough Asgardians that the word ‘crammed’ was an appropriate one to describe their living situation. There were other cargo bays on _The Statesman_ , but all of them were full of crates and boxes that had never been unloaded. Or perhaps they had been loaded in anticipation of a future run. Regardless, Thor and he had taken a tour of the ship one day early on in their sojourn, discovered the unlivable state of the rest of the cargo bays, and decided to put the task aside for another day.

Perhaps that day was today. Loki tapped a finger on his hip and pressed his lips together. Yes. The more he thought about it, the more he liked this idea. And he wouldn’t even mention it to Thor; he’d simply let people know that another cargo bay had been cleared out and the resulting gratitude would eventually make its way to Thor, who would ask around to find out who had done it. When he eventually discovered who was responsible, Loki would brush off his thanks, magnanimously not mentioning that Thor had said he was wasting his time on useless pursuits.

Of course, now that he thought about it, he couldn’t simply tell people. Who would he choose? There would be a mad dash to a newer, cleaner living space, probably followed by fights. Making a face, Loki admitted to himself that maybe this plan wasn’t the best. Someone should probably take charge of choosing how the new cargo bay would be divided up, and he wasn’t particularly interested in that person being him. Well, fine. He’d just concern himself with the actual cleaning.

A slight smile flickered over his face. Was it funny or just sad that one of the Princes of Asgard was about to spend his day elbows deep in—well, whatever was in that cargo bay? Maybe he wouldn’t think all that hard about it.

Instead, he turned and made his way back midship, where a lift was located that would bring him down to the level that Cargo Bay 4 was located on. At least, he thought it was 4. Thor and he had a tendency to refer to them by their attributes: “the one with the odd smell,” “the one where we couldn’t get the lights to turn on.” Luckily it was the latter, not the former, where he was headed.

He felt his mood lifting further as he walked. This idea of his, while not exactly what he’d call _fun_ , was appealing in a certain altruistic way. Yes, this was the right choice. It would make everyone happy, and there truly was something nice about making people happy. He’d never been very good at it, so he needed to grab the obvious opportunities when they presented themselves.

The lift button lit up when he punched it. As he waited for it to arrive, he nodded to a few people who passed by. Then the doors opened and he started to step inside.

But he came to a dead stop when he saw that the lift was occupied. The Valkyrie stared at him, the expression on her face as unimpressed as ever when the two of them were forced into each other’s company. Scrapper 142, Valkyrie, Brunnhilde—whatever she wanted to go by, there was one thing he knew about her: the two of them were not friends. Furthermore, they probably never would be. They had learned to tolerate each other and, it had to be said, they’d come a long way in a month, considering there had been at least one physical altercation between the two of them in that time. But coexistence wasn’t the same as friendship, and Loki had neither hope nor desire for the latter.

“Alright, Lackey?” she asked, not bothering to mask her sneer with any subtlety. “Up or down?”

“Aren’t you getting off?” he asked, wrinkling his nose as though faced with something unpleasant. It wasn’t exactly untrue.

Exaggeratedly, she looked from left to right, then back to him, a smirk on her face. “Doesn’t look like it.”

He let out a huff of air. He supposed he could wait for her to get off at whatever her destination was, then wait for the lift to return, but that seemed a bit immature. Though, he was sure Thor would be quick to point out that Loki had a bad habit of being immature when confronted with a situation he didn’t like. So he got on the lift, his eyes scanning the bank of buttons as he selected the one for his deck. Good, she was getting off in two levels. They wouldn’t even have to speak.

Except she asked, “What are you doing on _that_ deck? There’s nothing down there except the cargo bay with the weird smell.”

Shaking his head, he said, “No, that’s the next level up. It’s the one with no lights.”

“Oh, right.” She raised her eyebrows at him. “So?”

The lift moved and he shrugged. This wouldn’t be a long conversation; he could afford to be truthful. “I thought I’d take a look at it and see if I can’t do something with it. We need the space.”

As the lift stopped at her floor and the doors opened, he held out an arm for her to exit. But she didn’t. Instead, she stared at him, an intrigued look on her face. “Like, clean it up so people can move in there?” she asked.

He felt a muscle in his face twitch. Why was she prolonging this interaction? “That was the idea,” he said. “I’m certainly not doing it for my own amusement.” The lift doors began closing so he hit the button to keep them open. “I’m sure you have important things to attend to,” he said, even though he was sure of the opposite, “so please don’t let me keep you.”

But she didn’t move. She simply crossed her arms over her chest and leaned back against the wall, regarding him. He watched her with mounting consternation. There was a thoughtful expression on her face. Finally, she asked, “Need some help?”

“What?” he asked, his brow furrowing. And then, “ _No_ , obviously not, I’m quite capable of clearing out a cargo bay by myself.” Was he? Those bays were huge and he didn’t remember exactly how much was in there. It had been hard to tell since the lights didn’t work. It wasn’t really important; for the purposes of this discussion, he _was_ perfectly capable of clearing out a cargo bay by himself.

The lift doors started to close again—and again, he kept them open. But she stayed where she was. “Don’t be stupid,” she said. “It will go faster with two people.”

“Why do you even care?” he asked.

She gave him a look which suggested that even though she’d just advised him not to be stupid, that she already thought he was. “In case you haven’t noticed, I live on this ship too? I’m Asgardian? Those are just as much _my_ people as yours jammed in that cargo bay together? Why _wouldn’t_ I want to help?”

Put like that, she had a point. And as always, it eased something in him to be called an Asgardian, when all of these people knew he wasn’t, not technically. And she’d seen him running from it. Then again, perhaps that made her one of the few people to understand what it was like to reject a label and then reclaim it. After all, she, too, had run from the word, opting to become a Sakaaran scrapper instead of remaining a Valkyrie. There wasn’t much glory, he supposed, in being the last of one’s kind. Never mind ‘glory.’ There wasn’t much happiness in it, to see your closest friends butchered. He wondered who the woman had been who had sacrificed her life for Brunnhilde. A lover? The pain in her memory had been raw enough.

Hesitating for another moment, Loki removed his hand from the button and allowed the lift doors to close. “Fine,” he said. And then, because he still had manners, he added grudgingly, “Thank you.”

She shrugged, then smirked. “Don’t mention it. Anyway, I get the feeling His Majesty, The Mighty Thor, could use a bright spot this week. You’d know better than me, but he’s been in a _terrible_ mood, hasn’t he?”

Loki gave her a sidelong look as the lift continued to descend, loathe to throw his brother under the bus. “He has a lot on his mind,” he finally replied.

“Huh. Don’t we all.”

The lift arrived at their destination and they both got off, making their way down the corridor until they arrived at Cargo Bay 4. Well, at least he’d remembered the right number. He keyed the door panel to open the doors and—nothing. The cargo bay remained shut.

Brunnhilde kicked at them. “Why won’t it open?”

“How should I know?” Loki snapped. They’d opened when Thor and he had come down here. Then again, that had been weeks ago. Futilely pressing the button again, he said, “Maybe there’s a problem with the entire electrical system down here.” Maybe they were infested with some kind of Sakaaran rodent. Or some kind of non-Sakaaran rodent—Loki didn’t know where this ship had been. Heimdall probably did; he would have pulled the ship’s logs, no doubt. Well, if that was the case, they could always start hunting them to supplement their diets.

Loki made a face at his own bad joke, even though he hadn’t said it out loud. What a disgusting thought. Then again, he’d done many disgusting things over the course of the last month, all in the name of keeping this ship running. Eating rodents wouldn’t be the worst thing he’d ever done in his life.

Though he preferred not to hunt them, if it came to that. He didn’t like killing animals, even vermin.

He abandoned the door panel and studied the cargo bay doors to see if there was a manual release on them. As he was doing so, Brunnhilde moved in, jammed her fingers into the seam between the two door sections, and pulled. Teeth gritted, muscles straining, she yelled as she hauled on them. They creaked and budged a little, but not much.

Glaring at him, she said, “Were you planning on helping?”

“Brute strength isn’t really my thing,” he said. When her glare got more furious, he snorted and added, “But I suppose.”

With the two of them applying their full strength, the doors eventually opened with a shriek of protest. They didn’t seem to be seated quite right anymore, either. Tremendous. That would be another thing to fix. Add it to the list. Sometimes, Loki hated this ship. Judging by Brunnhilde’s growl of irritation, the feeling was mutual.

The cargo bay was completely dark inside. On every other part of the ship, when a door opened, lights turned on. But not this bay. They never had.

“Are there any damn lights in here?” Brunnhilde asked, her annoyance seeming somehow amplified by the darkness.

“No. Remember?” Flicking a wrist, Loki summoned several orbs of light to himself. They bobbed around his head, floating upwards and away from him as he swiveled his head to look along both sides of the wall. A crash, followed by a curse, came from somewhere in front of him, and he rolled his eyes and called, “I don’t think the electrical reset is likely to be in the middle of the bay, do you?” Her response was slightly less profane than her response to tripping, but not by much.

With a smirk, Loki looked around. Hopefully the lighting in the cargo bay wasn’t simply burnt out. He followed the wall, his orb of light floating in front of him, until he found a panel set into it. On the panel was a switch surrounded by several buttons. He flipped the switch, but nothing happened, so he put it back, pushed a button, and tried again.

The lights flickered to life all along the walls, illuminating the cargo bay. The Valkyrie was nowhere to be seen, but the evidence of her passage was obvious. He rolled his eyes again, then said loudly, “You’re welcome, by the way.”

There was a muffled sound that might have been, “Thanks,” though he highly doubted it.

The bay wasn’t as massive as the main one that they’d been using for the majority of their housing needs, but it was still large. Crates were piled high, several times his height, and filled more than half of the space. He snapped his fingers and his orbs of light whispered out of existence.

Brunnhilde couldn’t have gone far. Anyway, he had only to follow the sounds of her destroying something. Several somethings, as the case might have been. In a minute, he found her, scaling a stack of crates. He put his hands on his hips and watched her, and when she reached the top, she hefted one of the crates on an adjoining stack and said, “Catch.”

“I beg your—” But he had to jump back as she tossed the crate and it crashed to the ground where he’d been standing. Glaring up at her, he snapped, “Was that really necessary?”

She smirked at him, almost an echo of his earlier expression. “What’s the matter, Lackey? Not strong enough to catch it?”

At this, he rolled his eyes. “Spare me from measuring your proverbial dick. I’d just rather you didn’t aim for my head.”

With a snort, Brunnhilde said, “Didn’t think an uppity prince like you even knew how to talk like that.”

“Please. I’ve been fighting battles since before I was six hundred years old. I’m long past the kind of delicacy it would take to be offended by any kind of vulgarity, let alone something that mild.”

When she smirked at him again, lifting another crate, he readied himself to catch it. And to be fair, this time she gave him a second to prepare himself, so when it sailed through the air, he was able to intercept it with a grunt.

“What’s in here?” he said, grimacing at the way the muscles in his arms pulled. Clearly, he was getting out of shape with nothing to do on this ship. Er, well, he supposed there was plenty to do, to Thor’s point earlier, but Loki hadn’t been involved in much of the literal heavy lifting.

“Don’t know,” Brunnhilde said. “Whatever it is, it’s got weight to it.”

“Yes,” Loki said musingly, keeping half an eye on her to make sure she wasn’t going to fling another crate at him, and the other on the crates themselves. They didn’t appear to be secured, so he knelt down and tried to pull one open. The opening was stuck and he summoned one of his knives to his hands, jamming it into the seam on the top of the crate and prying it apart.

He was rewarded with a crack as the crate opened. Belatedly, it occurred to him that perhaps the crate wasn’t _stuck_ shut—it may have been secured because whatever was inside was dangerous. He leaned back, but nothing dangerous materialized, and he peered into the crate.

All he could do was stare, not quite daring to believe his eyes. Or, perhaps, doubting that he knew what he was really looking at.

“What’s inside?” Brunnhilde called down to him.

He reached a hand in, poking at the contents of the crate with the tip of his knife. “I think,” he said slowly, “that it’s food.”

“What?” At this, Brunnhilde leapt down from the top of the stack of crates and came to his side. Putting her hands on her hips, she tilted her head and looked down. “Damn,” she said. “I think you’re right. Do you think it’s any good?”

The temptation to say _only one way to find out_ and have her eat some of it was hard to resist, though it was more likely she’d simply fling it back in his face. “I’m not sure I can identify it to even make that determination,” he said. When she rolled her eyes at him, he pursed his lips and took a closer look at what was in the crate. It might be some kind of noodle? It might also be worms. But he was pretty sure it was noodles.

Gingerly, he picked up one of the bundled sheaves of maybe-noodles/maybe-worms. They looked like they’d be slimy, but they had a dry, almost powdery feeling. He smelled them. Inoffensive. Probably not worms. Taking a chance, he broke off a small piece and popped it into his mouth, hoping it wasn’t poisonous to Asgardians. Or Frost Giants. He supposed he didn’t really know how that worked. His diet had never been appreciably different than Thor’s. Had their parents made sure there was nothing in the royal diet that a Frost Giant couldn’t eat? But they’d never _told_ him not eat anything either; never told him he had an allergy to certain foods.

This was both supremely unimportant and also symptomatic of everything they’d lost. He could never ask his parents how deep the magic went that gave him his Asgardian appearance. He’d suspected for years that it wasn’t an appearance, that his father’s magic had turned him into an Asgardian for all intents and purposes. But his control over the Casket of Ancient Winters had shown that he still retained some of his Jotun heritage.

Shaking himself, he concentrated on the taste of the noodle. It tasted like—nothing, honestly. A faint hint of whatever cereal crop it had been made out of; possibly something mineral-y from the local water. He wondered if it needed to be cooked or if it was meant to be served the way it was. “It seems like food,” he finally said.

Her hands on her hips, she asked, “Do you think there’s food in the rest of these?”

“It would certainly be convenient if there were.”

It would mean they wouldn’t have to detour to that space station. They wouldn’t lose precious weeks going out of their way. They’d get to Earth more quickly. Of course, that also meant that whatever was going to happen to Loki on Earth was going to happen that much sooner, but—well, it was better for everyone else.

Though, he really needed to talk to Thor about whether it was _really_ a good idea to bring him back to Earth. Perhaps he’d just get in one of the smaller ships on board and fly off into the ether. Showing up on Midgard with him in tow was going to cause trouble for everyone. And perhaps Thor wouldn’t really want to deal with it. Perhaps Thor would throw him to the wolves. Would he do that? No. Of course not. He never had. And now things were getting better between them. Probably. Hopefully. Most days. This past week was likely just an aberration.

Maybe he should just concentrate on the food and getting this cargo bay cleaned out. If he was doing something in the way that Thor thought was the right way to do things, he could only hope it would show that he did care, that all of this _did_ matter. That Loki was worth keeping around.

“This is going to take forever,” Brunnhilde said.

He shrugged. “Do you have anything better to do?” A month ago he probably would have added, _Other than drink?_ Was that character growth that he didn’t? Or was it simply the fact that he didn’t want go back to his quarters tonight and explain why he had blood all over his clothes again, not to mention a black eye? Knowing that Loki and Brunnhilde had been fighting (again) would just make Thor’s mood worse.

Though she made a derisive noise, in the end, she said, “Not really.”

Loki nodded and pried open the second crate. More noodles. Hopefully it wasn’t _all_ noodles. It was food, but it would become a bit boring if it was all they had to eat on the journey to Earth.

She glanced at him. “How do you want to do this?”

The chaotic part of him wanted to respond, _Just start opening them up_ , but—he was more, right? More than chaos, more than mischief. It hit him, suddenly, that perhaps this was what Thor really meant by getting upset at Loki for ‘not doing anything.’ Thor didn’t know what he was doing. He didn’t want the throne; it had simply been thrust upon him and he’d realized—this was his responsibility. Perhaps it was even his destiny, if Thor believed in destiny. It was hard to imagine Thor believing in destiny, not when he’d always been able to bend reality to his will. But he’d finally faced this thing, this gargantuan duty, this monstrous obligation, that had always terrified him: sitting on Asgard’s throne, ruling the Nine Realms. Losing everything had made him realize that he couldn’t run anymore.

They had that in common. Loki, too, had realized he didn’t want to run, as terrifying as the idea was.

His brother needed help. And Loki knew that intellectually. But suddenly he _felt_ it, in a way he couldn’t explain—a physical sensation in his bones, that Thor was overwhelmed, unsure, maybe even a bit…afraid? The two of them were in this together. Ragnarok sat squarely on both of their shoulders. And as much as he didn’t want to admit it, he recognized that when Thor became overwhelmed, he became far less able to see things anyone else’s way.

Loki sighed. Perhaps they had that in common, too.

Brunnhilde was watching him, taking in the faraway expression on his face. Mercifully, she didn’t ask him what he was thinking about. He would have had to sneer at her that it was none of her business if she had. Instead, she pointed over her shoulder with a thumb and said, “We can go row by row. If we work at this every day…” She made a face. “It might only take us a couple weeks. Gods.” Letting out a hard breath of air, she added, “No point in taking that long. Let’s get some people to help us. There’s enough down here for a feast. More like _several_ feasts, actually.”

“You have a point,” Loki said. She shot him a surprised look. Well, yes. It was a bit surprising that he’d admitted this out loud. He wasn’t in the habit of acknowledging the value of other people’s input, particularly not hers.

But something about what she’d said niggled at him. Enough for a feast, indeed. Yule had been…well, a bit of a bust this year. When your murderous older sister spent most of the season slaughtering people and setting things on fire, it tended to put a damper on people’s festivities. Time had passed oddly on Sakaar, obviously, but Loki thought Yule had come and gone while he’d been there.

There was another feast, though—one which he couldn’t believe he’d forgotten, especially considering his current company.

“Brunnhilde,” he said slowly. She looked at him and he cast his eyes over the cargo bay. “What if we had a feast?”

“Just for the hel of it?” she asked.

So she didn’t know what day it was, either. Or perhaps she hadn’t bothered with Asgardian holidays for so long that she’d sloughed off all knowledge of them. He wasn’t sure if he was annoyed with her for doing so or envious of the fact that she’d managed it, when he’d never been able to convince himself that he wasn’t Asgardian for more than a few weeks at a time. And even then, he’d known he was lying to himself.

“The Dísablót is this week,” he said.

Her eyebrows went up. Ah. So she recognized it. “Damn.” A shadow crossed her face, settling in her eyes before she blinked it away. “I haven’t heard that in a long time.”

No, he didn’t imagine so. There had been nothing in her apartment on Sakaar to indicate where she’d come from, and he’d had time to study it after she’d chained him up and brought him back there. The thought almost made him snort. That sounded far more interesting than it had actually been, though quite honestly, the very last thing he’d have been interested in on that particular day was a romantic liaison.

“You still celebrated that on Asgard?” she asked, her tone far more blustering than it had been a moment ago. He recognized it for what it was and didn’t dig into the wound. Anyway, he owed that much to her, considering he’d rifled through her memories to find her worst one. His attempt to weaponize it hadn’t really turned out all that well for him. Oh well. It could have turned out worse. At least he’d found his idiot brother in the end.

“Faithfully,” he said.

She leered. “Not _that_ faithfully, I’m guessing. The Valkyrie orgies were pretty legendary.”

With a snort, he said, “Well, no.” Loki remembered finding out about this aspect of the Dísablót—which was, after all, a festival to celebrate the Dísir and the Valkyrior—in his adolescence. The women-only orgies had supposedly gone on for days, though he did have his doubts about some of the things that had been written about them, considering the author of the particular text was a man. He’d shared all of it with Thor and held his punchline until Thor looked as uncomfortable as possible, then said, “Just think, you wouldn’t get to participate, even if they’d _let_ you be a Valkyrie. But I’d be able to.”

Thor hadn’t been amused. It hadn’t really been one of Loki’s better jokes, to be fair.

Rolling his eyes, he added to Brunnhilde, “You can feel free to try to get the tradition going again, but find somewhere private, will you?”

She returned the eye roll. “It’s fine. After Sakaar, I think I’m off orgies for a while.” She crossed her arms over her chest and toed the nearest crate with a boot. “You really think putting together a feast for the Dísablót is a good idea?” she asked, sounding doubtful. “Don’t you think it will just make people miss what they’ve lost even more?”

“Maybe.” Loki chewed at the inside of his cheek. “But I think it would be a good distraction. It’s something…different. Norns know we need something different.”

That was putting it lightly. Every day presented a new challenge, and yet, somehow, it was all exactly the same. _The Statesman_ was only so large; you could only walk it so many times. Even though they were moving through space, one patch of it looked much the same as any other. The galaxy was vast, and any travel through it would be made almost entirely in the black, empty spaces between stars. Today’s muted light show in their wake had been the most exciting thing to happen outside the ship’s windows since Asgard’s destruction. Hopefully someone else had noticed.

Plus, they’d all been invoking the Norns an awful lot recently. The Norns fell under the umbrella of the Dísir, and quite honestly, they’d earned a feast in their honor.

“I think we should do it,” he said—and then, hearing the wavering note in his voice, added, “It would be good for everyone.”

If Thor had said it, she wouldn’t have that doubtful expression on her face, both because no one ever doubted Thor when he said anything, but also because Thor had a natural ability to convince people that what he said was a wonderful idea, even—sometimes especially—when it wasn’t. Loki had a tendency to poke at an idea from every single side and angle, looking for all its weaknesses and problems. Thor just waved weaknesses aside, or assumed his abilities would make up for them.

Neither approach was ideal. Something Loki’s mother had once said to him came back to him—that Thor and Loki needed each other, that Thor would need Loki in particular once he became king. At the time, he’d scoffed, unwilling and unable to see how this could possibly be true.

Now, he thought he was beginning to see her point.

The Valkyrie hesitated, but then she shrugged and said, “Okay. I guess technically, I’m supposed to listen to you, since you’re the prince.”

He bristled, then made himself stop. Even if he didn’t want to be a leader, circumstances had forced him into it. “Do you think it’s a bad idea?”

At this, she shot a surprised look at him, which faded as her expression grew more thoughtful. Finally, she replied, “No. Actually, I think it’s probably a pretty good idea. Especially coming from you, Lackey.”

The two of them stared at each other, as though neither of them could quite believe that they were having this exchange. It was so…civil. Loki had presented an idea and Brunnhilde had agreed to it. The most they’d previously agreed on had been their mutual dislike for each other.

No, that wasn’t quite true. But they certainly weren’t bosom friends.

She put her hands on her hips and looked around the cargo bay. “But if you want have it in the next month, we’re still going to need help with this.”

“I want to keep it a secret,” Loki said before he could stop himself. It sounded utterly childish. It was mortifying.

But Brunnhilde nodded. “Okay.” Then, she grinned. “I kind of like it. It’s fun to have a nice secret for once.”

That was a feeling he could sympathize with more than she knew. Or perhaps not. She probably wouldn’t be at all surprised to know that he felt the exact same way. This was a nicer kind of mischief than what he normally dealt in, but he knew what she meant. It _was_ nice.

“Do you know anyone we can trust not to say anything?” he asked. It felt odd to refer to the two of them as a unit. But he supposed, in some ways, they were. The two of them and Heimdall were the satellites around Thor that dealt with what he wasn’t able to—though Heimdall might not want to include himself in that circle. Loki rather got the opinion that Heimdall only stuck out continued association with all of them because he thought they might get themselves killed if he didn’t. Quite honestly, he was probably right.

The point was, Brunnhilde and Loki were, in some sense, a unit. Thor depended on them, whether the two of them wanted to admit it or not, and that meant that they needed to work together.

The thought didn’t thrill Loki. Brunnhilde grated on him. If nothing else, she was a rival for his brother’s affections. Deep down, he feared that his newfound closeness with Thor might be shattered by Thor’s friends coming between them, as Loki had once blamed the Warriors Three for doing.

But a thought snuck in that perhaps the reason Brunnhilde annoyed him so much was because she was like a mirror. She had run from her past, landed on Sakaar, done her best to make a life for herself there—and failed at it, just like him. They were similar in ways Loki didn’t particularly like admitting, because they weren’t qualities he was proud of possessing.

Lost souls, both of them, he supposed. Taken together with Bruce, Thor had quite the collection of them.

Speaking of their only human passenger— “I think Bruce would help,” Loki offered. “He’d be more use in his big, green, and angry form, but he’s also probably better equipped to keep quiet about this the way he currently is.”

Brunnhilde nodded. “Korg’s a no-go. He couldn’t keep his mouth shut if you paid him.”

“How about Astrid?” he asked. She’d been one of his handmaidens when he’d ruled Asgard in disguise as Odin.

“The one who has a thing for you?” Brunnhilde asked, raising her eyebrows. “Do you think she likes you better now or when you looked like Odin? You hoping to sneak behind some crates for some private time?”

Giving her a withering look and regretting that he’d been thinking of her in an almost positive way two minutes ago, Loki said, “Hardly. And she doesn’t have a ‘thing’ for me, nor did she ever.”

With a shrug, Brunnhilde said, “Fine. Whatever. If there’s nothing going on between you two, mind if I try my luck?”

Loki gave her a flat look, though he supposed there was something a bit touching in the fact that she’d made sure he wasn’t interested before she made any romantic advances. “Be my guest.”

Brunnhilde shot him a smile—a far more pleasant one, actually, than he was used to seeing on her face. Softer, maybe. _The Statesman_ was giving more than one person the opportunity to unfold parts of themselves that hadn’t seen the light for a long time. “She’s so…tall,” Brunnhilde said.

At her tone, practically dreamy, Loki had to laugh. “Did you want to pick an aisle for everyone else to stay away from, or…?”

She smirked at him and thumped him in the chest with a fist. “Very funny.”

Rubbing at the spot she’d hit him, he replied, “Well, I try. My sense of humor is one of my better qualities.”

There was a silence. She stared at him and he arched an eyebrow, daring her to respond with something insulting—his sense of humor didn’t make up for the rest of his personality; even that wasn’t great; et cetera. But she shrugged and said, “Hey, if people ever needed to laugh, it’s now.”

And as this was undeniable, he didn’t bother denying it.

The two of them exchanged a glance, and then, wordlessly, they got to work cleaning the cargo bay. Several hours later, they hadn’t made much of a dent in it, but they’d found a number of other foods in the crates, enough variety that their makeshift feast might actually feel like a proper one. At least there was a cleared space in the center of the cargo bay. They’d work outwards from there tomorrow, hopefully with help.

After divvying up the recruitment of their co-conspirators, they turned the lights off, slid the door shut, and headed back to the lift. Brunnhilde had a few other people in mind and Loki and dubiously decided to ask Heimdall, though he had his doubts that Heimdall would have the time or desire to help with this.

When the lift stopped at his floor, Loki got off and headed back to his quarters. He felt grimy. Hopefully the water recycler wasn’t broken again, because he felt in desperate need of a shower.

Their quarters were dark when he let himself in, which meant Thor was either out or asleep. The time precluded neither; he could have gone to bed early, or he could have gone out and not returned yet. To be safe, Loki didn’t turn on any lights, instead picking his way towards the bathroom in the dark.

When he emerged from a long, hot shower, it was to find Thor sitting in the living area of their quarters. He was looking at the book that Loki had been reading earlier. When the bathroom door slid open, Thor looked up and met Loki’s eyes. He looked chagrined, so Loki bit back the urge to say something sarcastic.

“I was looking for you,” Thor said.

“Oh?” Loki replied coolly. He tightened the towel around his waist and reached back to twist his wet hair into a knot.

“Yes,” Thor said. He looked awkward, but he still said, “I wanted to…apologize. For my words earlier.” Holding up the book, he added, “You obviously weren’t reading this for pleasure.”

At this, Loki relented a little and allowed a small smile to ghost across his face. “No. I sincerely hope there’s no one in the universe who _would_ read that for pleasure. It’s dry even by the standards of user manuals.”

Thor chuckled and set the book aside. He clasped his hands together in his lap and stared at them. He adjusted his eyepatch. Then, he cleared his throat. Loki watched him before he pulled his clothes back on, which left Thor waiting, clearly wanting to say something, but not wanting to do it while Loki only had his pants half on.

Finally, once Loki had a shirt and pants on, Thor said, “I mean it, you know. What I said to you wasn’t fair. I thought on it while you were…wherever you were. You _do_ help. You’ve been an immeasurable help.”

Wordlessly, Loki went to perch on the arm of the sofa. He glanced at Thor, then shrugged. “I could do more,” he said. “Things that are…” What had Bruce called it? They hadn’t been talking about running Asgard/ _The Statesman_ , but Loki thought the phrase applied. “…outside my _comfort zone._ ” Raising an eyebrow, he added, “You’ve certainly had to.”

Thor looked surprised. Loki didn’t blame him. This was about as close as he ever got to an apology.

There was a silence, a far more comfortable one than Loki would have expected when he’d first returned to their quarters. He hadn’t wanted to fight, but he had to admit he’d been prepared to. The tension between his shoulders loosened. Thor’s willingness to move past an argument was a far cry from Sakaar, where he’d refused to even speak to Loki.

“So, where were you?” Thor asked. “I was asking around. No one had seen you.”

With a slight smile, Loki said, “You should know that if I don’t want to be found, I won’t be.”

Thor shook his head, rolling his eyes good-naturedly. “Just like when we were children.”

“Admittedly, there were far more places I could disappear to back then,” Loki said.

Immediately, the mood sobered. Why did he say these things? Just to see if he could? To test Thor? To see if his brother would get angry and push him away? Sometimes he wondered if there would ever come a day when he _wasn’t_ afraid of this happening, when he didn’t need to constantly push and prod and test Thor’s love for him.

Loki rolled his shoulders. The tension was back. The ache between his shoulders wasn’t only due to that, though, it was also from the day’s work. He was tired in that honest way that came from doing something physical, which made a nice change. Normally his exhaustion was due to his mental state. He yawned and stood up. “I’m going to bed.”

Thor nodded. “Good-night.”

As Loki pulled the door to the bedroom shut, he caught Thor picking up the book on impulse engine repair again. It made him smile a little, but he didn’t say anything. When he laid down, he dropped off to sleep instantly.

* * *

Even Heimdall agreed to help.

In fact, he seemed to relish it, particularly the part where Loki swore him to secrecy. Then again, Heimdall _did_ have a track record of doing things that needed to be kept from Asgard’s king, so perhaps this wasn’t surprising. Now that Loki was thinking about it, Heimdall had developed quite the rebellious streak.

When he pointed this out, his tone sly, Heimdall glanced over at him. They were working side by side in the cargo bay, and everything _was_ going much faster with the extra help. Heimdall’s face had remained serious for a second—very much the Guardian of the Bifrost—before he smiled. “Or perhaps we should call it a mischievous streak?” he asked.

“I certainly wouldn’t be the one to argue with that,” Loki said.

It took them four days—four grueling, long days. Perhaps it hadn’t been necessary to clear everything so quickly, but the idea of celebrating the Dísablót on the actual day had caught on. If Thor was suspicious about where Loki kept disappearing to, he didn’t ask. It was almost a shame. Loki had several good lies lined up depending on what Thor asked or accused him of. But his brother didn’t seem all that curious, which stung, if Loki was being honest. He didn’t want to be questioned about his whereabouts. But he wanted Thor to prove he cared.

On the evening of the fourth day, the six of them—Loki, Brunnhilde, Heimdall, Bruce, Astrid, and Astrid’s son, Sten (whom Loki hadn’t even known existed until _The Statesman_ )—stood in the middle of a clear cargo bay. They’d moved all the crates to one side, catalogued the food in them, and set aside the amount they needed for the feast. Astrid and Bruce had both experimented with ways to combine the food and come up with something edible, though calling it a ‘recipe’ seemed a bit much. It gave the noodles some flavor, and boiling the vegetables softened them enough to eat. And no one had started vomiting. That was important.

“So do we tell people or what?” Bruce asked, looking to Brunnhilde and Loki.

She shrugged. “It’s Lackey’s thing.”

“ _My_ thing?” he asked.

Raising her eyebrows, she said, “Yeah. Isn’t it?”

It sounded alarmingly sentimental. It sounded alarmingly like he _cared._ And—well—he _did_ care, he supposed, but he wasn’t sure he wanted everyone to know it. Flicking a wrist, he said, “It doesn’t matter to me.”

The others looked amused, which he didn’t particularly appreciate. Well, except Sten, who just looked bored and like he was ready for the adults in the room to get on with it.

At first, this made him bristle. For so long, he had been everybody’s second choice. The lesser son, the distrusted younger prince. But now they were looking at him as if they knew him, as if they’d earned the right to joke with him and tease him. They hadn’t.

Or had they? There were so few of them left now. Whatever mistakes they’d made, whatever class barriers had existed, whatever preconceptions they’d held about anyone else, whatever legitimate grievances people might hold, all of it by necessity had to be cast aside now. Yes, they existed. They couldn’t be erased. But they could look past all of that. If none of the damage was so bad that it had entirely destroyed the foundations of the Asgardian people, of the relationships that held them together, then they had to move on. Thor and Loki had saved Asgard from extinction—for now. They clung to the universe, to their existence, by the slenderest of threads. One ship, moving slowly through the black of space, friendless, anonymous, unknown. They couldn’t afford to allow the wrongs of the past to divide them.

Loki glanced at the crates set aside for the feast. It would be difficult, not to mention conspicuous, if there was a parade of people carrying crates of food up to the mess. They needed a way to hold this feast completely within the cargo bay. And the Dísablót was tomorrow. “Can we get some heating units in here?” he asked slowly. “If we have something to cook with, I can use magic to keep everything warm.”

“I can bring mine down,” Astrid said. “We’re sharing with a few other families. If I told them why I need it, they might spread the word.” She smiled slightly at Loki. “That way, you wouldn’t need to make an announcement, if that’s what you’re trying to avoid.”

With a sniff, Loki said, “The PA system isn’t working right. Of course I don’t want to make a ship-wide announcement.”

No one looked particularly convinced, but he hadn’t really been trying all that hard.

They lapsed into silence again and Loki knew they were waiting for him to give some kind of order. Or, it not an order, direction. This _had_ been his thing. It was a bit foolish to deny it. Picking at his demi-gaunts, he said, “We’ll need to have at least enough food prepared for everyone to have one helping when they get here. How early are you all willing to get up and start cooking?”

It was a new feeling, being himself and being respected for it, being in the company of others and not wondering if they wouldn’t prefer he wasn’t there at all. It was what he’d always wanted and what he’d never quite worked out how to get his hands on. He couldn’t untangle if events had forced him to change or if the change had been in him the whole time, but events had simply hastened his ability to embrace it.

That thought wasn’t a particularly nice one. His identity destroyed, his parents dead, his home literally blown to bits—all so he could stumble closer to self-actualization? Then again, maybe it was simply a side effect of cataclysm. Some plants couldn’t grow without fire burning everything around them. Ragnarok, if the old tales were true, was a cycle of death and rebirth. Perhaps he hadn’t been literally reborn, but he certainly felt changed.

He took a breath and looked at Brunnhilde, Heimdall, Bruce, and Astrid. Her son had wandered off. With a nonchalant shrug, as though it didn’t much matter, he said, “I’ll be here early.”

One by one, they all agreed. Astrid reiterated that she’d bring at least one heating unit down and Bruce offered to disconnect the one in his cabin and set it up in the cargo bay. They decided to spread the word that something was happening around midday in Cargo Bay 4. Hopefully they’d have enough food prepared by then.

They parted ways, returning to their beds for a few hours of sleep, before they all reappeared in the cargo bay the following morning. Calling it ‘morning’ was a bit of a misnomer, even disregarding the fact that they were on a ship and there was obviously no sunrise. By the Asgardian clock they were all still keeping too, dawn was still hours away. But Loki hadn’t slept well in years, so it wasn’t much of a change for him. He yawned, rubbed at his eyes, and got to work.

When was the last time he’d cooked anything for himself? Had he _ever_ cooked anything for himself? It wasn’t as though there had been any need to on Asgard. When he grudgingly shared this, Astrid laughed, cutting up vegetables and dropping them in a pot with the noodles.

“Really?” she asked. “Not once?”

“Maybe when Thor and I went camping,” he mused. “If roasting food on a stick over a fire counts as cooking.”

With another laugh, she said, “Well, this isn’t much more complicated. I think even you and Thor could handle this.”

Glancing over his shoulder, he said, “Bruce is seasoning his.”

Her eyes widened and she swore, then dashed off. Loki smiled slightly and stirred at the…well, they’d decided to call it ‘stew.’ It wasn’t _not_ stew. When she returned, she had one of the canisters of spices that they’d found in several of the crates. “Don’t eat my first few batches,” she said conspiratorially. “I forgot.” Standing back and putting her hands on her hips, she asked, “Can you handle this? It’s just stirring until everything is soft enough to eat. Not so difficult, Your Highness.”

“I’ll try my best,” he said, putting a hand over his heart.

With a smile and a nod, she moved off. Loki watched her, noting she was headed towards Brunnhilde and that she slid her hand over Brunnhilde’s shoulder when she got there. Well, that was—good. He surprised himself by actually meaning it, even if it was only in his head. Though, Astrid had the son. Somehow, he doubted Brunnhilde was ready for that kind of commitment. Perhaps neither of them was looking for commitment.

Around midday, people began filtering into the cargo bay, exclaiming in surprise, especially once word got around that yes, actually, this _was_ for the Dísablót, no, of course they wouldn’t forget their traditions, their holidays, their way of life. Even if everything had been destroyed—well, Asgard wasn’t a place, it was a people. As long as just one of them remained alive, so would Asgard’s traditions.

No Thor, though. Loki had gotten back so late and left so early that he hadn’t even seen his brother, except as a snoring lump on his bed. It was possible, he supposed, that Thor might not hear word of something going on in one of the cargo bays at all.

Loki’s fingers fidgeted as he made the rounds, talking with people, even accepting a hug, a _hug_ , from one older woman who said dreamily that the Dísablót used to be her favorite holiday when she’d been young.

At that moment, Thor stepped into the cargo bay, looking bewildered. “Excuse me,” Loki said, smiling at the woman before moving away. He approached his brother, not sure whether he should smile, point out that he _was_ capable of doing something useful, or simply ask Thor what he wanted to drink. Not that the choices were all that exciting—water, their dwindling supply of alcohol, or the powdered drink that they’d found in the crates and mixed several vats of. It was vaguely fruity and Loki wasn’t sure he liked it, but then again, it was something different.

Instead of doing any of that, though, he felt an irritating trepidation on his face, a stupid desire to just have Thor _smile_ at him. As much as he hated to admit it, he just wanted Thor to look at him and tell him he’d done something right.

“What _is_ all of this?” Thor asked as Loki reached his side.

Loki glanced out over the bay, as though he hadn’t organized it. “We’re missing the Dísablót. Having a feast seemed a decent way to observe it, even if it’s not exactly the traditional fare. Or location. Or, well, anything.”

His eye roaming the room, Thor asked, “But where did all this food come from?”

“Brunnhilde and I found it,” Loki said. “The whole cargo bay was full of it.”

Thor’s gaze turned to Loki, who met it, tilting his chin up. It was impossible to read Thor’s expression, as it was so often these days. The kingship was already taking its toll on his brother, just as it had always taken a toll on their father. But Thor was already facing worse than Odin ever had. How could it do anything but wear him down? How could it do anything but change him? Loki’s heart faltered. Had he gotten his brother back, only to lose him to a stranger who would take his place?

But then, Thor’s face broke into a huge smile. “You did all of this?”

With a shrug, Loki said, “Brunnhilde helped. And Heimdall, Bruce, Astrid—”

Without warning, Thor turned to him, grabbing him in a crushing hug. Surprised, Loki did nothing for a moment, his arms dangling uselessly at his sides and a stupid, slack-jawed expression on his face. But when Thor didn’t let go, Loki raised his arms and wrapped them around Thor. “This is embarrassing,” Loki said.

“Yes, I’m sure,” Thor said, hugging him tighter.

Loki submitted to this. And if he allowed his head to bump again Thor’s, and then his chin to rest on Thor’s shoulder, as he’d done when they were children, well, this display couldn’t get more mortifying, anyway.

Finally, Thor let go of him. Still looking bewildered as he gazed around the room, he said, “So this is where you’ve been disappearing to.” When Loki nodded, Thor chuckled and said, “Heimdall, Brunnhilde, and Bruce, too.” Loki remained silent, watching his brother, and finally Thor turned back to him. There was a sad look in his eye, perhaps a bit pained, maybe even guilty. “This is because of what I said, isn’t it?”

Shrugging uncomfortably, Loki replied, “Partly. I suppose.”

“I was wrong to say it. I know that. I tried to tell you that you’re helpful—”

“Yes,” Loki said. “I know.” He crossed his arms over his chest and looked out over the cargo bay. “The problem is, one day I might not be.”

Thor’s brow furrowed. “What do you mean?”

Gesturing at the cargo bay, at the knots of their people eating together and laughing, a few of them singing songs he hadn’t heard in years—the kinds of things that were popular in taverns, where he hadn’t set foot in ages and never would again—Loki said, “This is me being helpful. There may be a time when I’m…not.”

His brow remaining furrowed, Thor asked, “And?”

“And…” Loki waved a hand, but didn’t know how to say what he wanted to say. Actually, he didn’t want to say it, but he’d already begun. Open communication. “Perhaps…my presence won’t be as…palatable.” He flicked his fingers. “Security codes to get off Sakaar, a ship to evacuate Asgard, a surprise feast for the Dísablót…I may have peaked early, brother. My aid and the gestures I’m able to make will certainly become less impressive in the days to come.”

And once they were on Earth…well, he didn’t know what would happen once they were on Earth. He really _did_ need to bring it up. Someday. They had months, after all. Or perhaps he wouldn’t bring it up, and they’d get to Earth, and things would be…what? Things would be alright? Was that possible? It certainly didn’t seem possible. But Thor thought so. And Thor always _had_ seemed able to bring things about through sheer force of will.

Thor was shaking his head. “Loki,” he said, then fell silent. Loki arched an eyebrow and Thor drew in a breath. “You can’t possibly think…” But he trailed off, then simply said, “You’re my brother.”

“I haven’t always been a good one,” Loki countered.

“Nor have I,” Thor said, his tone gruff and awkward.

That went without saying. Except, of course, it didn’t. The fact that they were articulating this particular, simple fact would have been unthinkable two months ago, when Thor had shown up on Asgard and stripped Loki of his disguise. And it had been even less time for Thor. Did that mean Thor got more credit? No, that didn’t feel necessary. Thor had always gotten more credit for everything.

What Loki didn’t say, because he couldn’t, was that he felt that his whole life had been an attempt to curry favor from different sources. He’d never gained it from their father, never understanding why until that night in the weapons vault. At least the damage his father had done was mostly unintentional. The same couldn’t be said of Thanos and the Grandmaster.

He took a breath. He had to say it. “When I wear out my usefulness, what will I be then?”

There was a long silence. On the other side of the cargo bay, Heimdall, Brunnhilde, and Bruce were laughing at something. Near them, Korg was singing something terrible which Loki unfortunately already knew had been the number one hit song on Ria the week he’d been arrested and sent to Sakaar. The children—what few of them remained—were running around, laughing and shouting. Somebody was tuning an instrument that had been cobbled together with items they’d found on board _The Statesman_ , but it was a surprisingly good approximation of a fiddle.

Thor turned to face him, putting his hands on Loki’s shoulders and gripping them tightly. “You’re my brother,” he repeated. “You don’t— _usefulness_ isn’t even—” He stopped, frustrated, and let out a breath. His fingers on Loki’s shoulders squeezed harder, and then Thor drew him into another hug. “I’m just glad you’re here,” he finally said.

Inarticulate. Unsurprising. This _was_ Thor. But Loki hooked an arm around his brother and returned the hug. He understood what Thor was trying to say, even if he couldn’t find the words to say it. Perhaps that was something else they’d learn how to have a conversation about on the long, slow journey to Earth.

Thor patted Loki’s back and Loki hugged him more tightly for a second. Something swelled in his chest, something which had been absent in his life for so long that the first time it had happened, he hadn’t quite known what he was feeling. Happiness was funny, though. It could spring from nothing, grow despite atrophy. It could take root even after apocalypse. It could find its way to two brothers for whom everything had been ash and misunderstandings and crumbling foundations.

Alright. This really _was_ getting embarrassing now. Loki still had something of a reputation to maintain, after all. He thumped Thor on the back affectionately and let go.

Then, pointing with a thumb over his shoulder, he asked, “So—shall we eat?”


End file.
